US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has sought to allay fears of a military confrontation with North Korea after President Donald Trump warned he could unleash "fire and fury" on the pariah state. Tillerson defended Trump's comments but said there was no sign that the threat level from North Korea had changed and that Americans should "sleep well at night." His unscheduled remarks, on a flight out of the region early Wednesday, appeared designed to dial back the unprecedented rhetoric from Trump. In comments that were significantly more incendiary than any made by US presidents in the past, Trump had appeared to threaten nuclear war with North Korea.

3. Meanwhile, the Twittersphere has excavated an Aug. 2013 Trump tweet and is busy retweeting it and commenting on it anew this morning:

Be prepared, there is a small chance that our horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us into World War III.

FBI agents raided the Alexandria home of President Trump's former campaign chairman late last month, using a search warrant to seize documents and other materials, according to people familiar with the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Federal agents appeared at Paul Manafort's home without advance warning in the predawn hours of July 26, the day after he met voluntarily with the staff for the Senate Intelligence Committee. The search warrant was wide-ranging and FBI agents working with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III departed the home with various records.

It's a truism of civilizational history that old people love to whine about the young. Yet the current wave of youth-bashing, while it borrows tropes from the past, is defined by the politics of the moment. ... Among these complaints about smartphones and lazy young people we can see a new conservative politics forming that eschews President Donald Trump's red-meat cultural politics, with its attacks on immigrants and people of color, and focuses on millennials and their successors.